Asked late last year how he was feeling, Frank Burch replied, "A little overwhelmed."

When 2005 began, Burch's law firm, Piper Rudnick, joined with British giant DLA and Silicon Valley powerhouse Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich to become one of the world's largest law firms. In the months since, Burch, as co-CEO, has helped oversee the work of bringing more than 3,000 lawyers together.

He has also discovered that after a while, even the most impressive hotel rooms meld into one big blur.

DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary is carving out a place for itself for the long term, Burch said. Ultimately, "there will be a relatively small number of truly global business law firms. We are clearly in the race to be one of those firms."

A year after DLA Piper's three-way merger, that race has heated up even faster than DLA predicted, with the firm picking up practices and lawyers internationally as opportunities surfaced.

The law firm's worldwide revenues hit $1.57 billion in 2005, a 12 percent jump from the firms' combined 2004 revenues. DLA Piper now represents more than half of the country's Fortune 100 companies "in a meaningful way," Burch explains. Its outposts range from Amsterdam to Zagreb, Croatia.

"It would appear that given the magnitude of this deal, and the size and scope of what they're trying to do, that it has so far been an unqualified success," said Thomas Clay, principal at legal consulting firm Altman Weil, which helped DLA develop its international strategy.

In Baltimore, the city that predecessor Piper & Marbury called home, the effects of the firm's evolution are less obvious. While DLA Piper is muscling into new markets, it was already one of Baltimore's top-tier firms, and its chief rivals say they haven't seen a big change in the firm's competitiveness for local clients. There has not been an exodus of lawyers from the firm, though a few have quietly left for competitors with more of a regional focus.

In a recent interview, Michael Baader, partner-in-charge for top competitor Venable LLP's Baltimore office, said DLA Piper has "a specific strategy that's working for them ... They're a formidable competitor in the marketplace." Venable was Baltimore's largest law firm by number of lawyers in 2005, with 177 local attorneys, according to Baltimore Business Journal research. Piper ranked second at the time with 174. As of this week, it had 164 Baltimore lawyers.

Changing times

About 25 years ago, Piper & Marbury predicted that many of Baltimore's corporate headquarters would disappear, and started diversifying its client base. Today, DLA Piper represents many of the nation's largest and most powerful companies -- of which fewer and fewer call Baltimore home. DLA Piper counts many of Baltimore's remaining stalwarts as clients, including T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and McCormick & Co., as well as hot homegrown technology companies like Visicu Inc., which is readying an initial public offering.

Behind the scenes, several lawyers who have left Piper in recent years say the firm's evolution has boosted rates to levels that some local companies are unwilling to pay. In 2005, the firm's hourly billings averaged $450 for partners and $300 for associates, Burch said -- though top partners' rates can climb far higher.

Venable partners billed an average of $426 in 2004, by comparison, according to Business Journal research. Partners at Miles & Stockbridge, Baltimore's fourth-largest law firm, billed an average of $348 that year.

Herbert Frerichs Jr. worked as a corporate attorney at Piper for 10 years. He is general counsel for Perdue Farms Inc., the privately held agriculture giant based in Salisbury. For his clients, he said, the cost of working with Piper rose as the firm grew -- and since they didn't need lots of worldwide legal work, the benefits didn't add up. Last year, Frerichs jumped to Philadelphia-based Saul Ewing LLP, Baltimore's eighth-largest law firm. "It was client-driven," he said of the move.

Burch says DLA Piper's rates are "squarely in the middle" of the group of about 25 national and international law firms that it considers its peers. The firm, he says, doesn't want to be everything to everyone, and it is not a logical fit for most small businesses. DLA Piper's target clientele is national and international corporate giants -- especially for securities work -- and emerging technology companies.

Thomson Financial ranked DLA Piper third globally among law firms advising on corporate mergers and acquisitions in 2005, while Mergermarket ranked the firm third in technology M&A advising in the United States.

DLA Piper says its growth benefits Baltimore in a number of ways. As the firm's revenues rose last year, its cash corporate giving in Baltimore rose 11 percent to $785,000. Locally, DLA Piper's pro bono hours -- which equal an hour's worth of free legal work -- rose to 12,552 last year. That was a 67 percent increase from the previous year, as the number of people participating rose.

Going international

Even within the firm, lawyers say it can be hard to wrap their minds around how a new office in Beijing affects the Baltimore operation's work. But some of DLA Piper's Baltimore lawyers say they are getting to work on cases the firm could never have done before the merger.

In the past year, Michelle Dickinson, an associate in DLA Piper's litigation group in Baltimore, has traveled to London and Turkey to work on a case in which the firm is representing a Turkish natural gas company. "We had such a local, regional practice when I started with Piper," said Dickinson, who joined the firm in 1998. "I would never have guessed we would have this kind of growth and these types of opportunities."

With losses of key Baltimore headquarters names still looming over the city, local economic development leaders say they are elated that DLA Piper maintains a strong base in Baltimore, though the firm has had no true headquarters for years.

Several local leaders say they still see Burch regularly, despite his globe-trotting schedule.

"I've seen no dropoff or lack of attention from Piper Rudnick" since the DLA merger, said Donald C. Fry, president of the Greater Baltimore Committee. "They still are very active with the GBC, very engaged in the economic growth of this area and concerned about that."

Management challenges

Piper & Marbury merged with Chicago-based Rudnick & Wolfe in 1999. The deal was then the largest law firm merger in history and kick-started Piper's ambitious growth plan. It also gave the firm a crash course in the details of making a merger work.

National legal experts -- several of which consulted on the DLA Piper deal -- are impressed with how it has played out so far.

"They've just done incredibly well on almost every test," said Bradford Hildebrandt, chairman of Hildebrandt International, which worked on the deal and the firms' strategy. Recruiting from competitors has been successful, revenues have grown and the firm has gained access to clients its predecessors could not, Hildebrandt said.

But successfully integrating the deal will take years. British giant Clifford Chance merged with New York's Rogers & Wells in 2000, and about two and a half years later, the legal press began reporting high-profile departures from Clifford's American offices.

Over the long term, everything from culture clashes to struggles in integrating compensation systems can trip up law firms' attempts to blend.

DLA Piper upped the ante last year by taking on even more lawyers internationally. As international law firm Coudert Brothers collapsed, DLA Piper picked up roughly 100 of its attorneys in key markets, from Beijing to Brussels. And when Ernst & Young unloaded its law practice in Russia, DLA Piper grabbed more than 80 attorneys.

Those were unique opportunities the firm couldn't pass up, Burch said. But he said this year, DLA Piper will do far less acquiring -- perhaps opening an office in one key U.S. market it still lacks -- and focus more on digesting all that it has bitten off. It will also begin a formal marketing push; recent ads in media including the Wall Street Journal have touted its worldwide M&A rankings.

The key to integration, said Burch, is getting lawyers thinking about how their practices work with other pieces of the firm. That happens, he said, every time people work together on cases or share ideas at retreats.

What the firm has pulled off in the past year, Burch said, has surprised even its top managers: "We all feel we've come a little further than we would have thought."